music
neurophilosophy | October 14, 2007Here's another of my favourite bands - Funkadelic, playing I Got a Thing (1970). The perfect acoustic accompaniment to pink Cadillacs and full-length fur coats, this could well be the funkiest film footage ever recorded. (And that is a blue Ku Klux Klan outfit he's wearing.)
mikethemadbiologist | October 13, 2007The MBTA in its infinite wisdom has started a pilot program to commercialize the public announcement system at subway stops:
The roar of subway cars and chords of amateur musicians at the T station will now face competition from Neil Diamond songs, 1970s trivia, and live playoff updates from Fenway Park.
It comes from T-Radio, an experiment that began yesterday at three stations and may someday broadcast on every subway platform in Eastern Massachusetts. Disc jockeys and media personalities will mix in light news, weather, entertainment tips, and the like. If it proves popular enough to go…
goodmath | October 12, 2007 Sorry for the slow posting this week, but work has been a bit intense, and I've also had some
family matters to take care of, which have left me with very little blogging time. Hopefully things will
be a bit less insane next week. In the meantime, here's a random bunch of weird music I've been listening to.
The Mars Volta, "This Apparatus Must Be Unearthed": the Mars Volta is a neo-progressive band I recently discovered. They're on the dark and noisy side. The best description I can give is that they sound sort of like what you'd get if you mixed King Crimson and Dream Theater, and then fed…
aardvarchaeology | October 11, 2007
Peps Persson is both one of Sweden's heaviest blues men and the single most authoritative reggae artist the country's produced. The sleeve of his 1975 hit album Hög standard parodies the sleeve from a likewise excellent ABBA album released earlier the same year. Yet the music is intricate studio-built stuff, far from the lo-fi live aesthetic popular with Swedish lefties at the time (who hated ABBA as a matter of political principle).
The album is sung entirely in a broad Scanian dialect, including a charming cover of Bob Marley's "Stir It Up". That song's Scanian lyrics are cheerfully lewd…
omnibrain | October 6, 2007Music education in the United States has typically been one of the first thing to be cut when it comes to balancing the budget. This is a horrible shame since music is one of those things (above any of the other arts) that has a wide ranging effect on peoples intellectual achievement. One of the holy grails in education and psychology is skill transference. Imagine being able to train one ability that positively affects the performance of many many other abilities. Sounds a bit ridiculous eh?! Well, music seem to be one of the only things that can have this effect. Psychologists have…
aardvarchaeology | October 5, 2007Three good albums, listened to in the car when driving to & fro the Djurhamn dig.
Silverbullit, Arclight (2004). This is dark and Gothamesque rock, sort of the Cure + the Stooges + Kraftwerk. The band searched high and low until they found a drummer who could and would play like a drum machine. One of the best Swedish records of the decade.
Olivia Tremor Control, Black Foliage (1999). The Pet Sounds era Beach Boys discover musique concrète just as the water supply becomes heavily contaminated with mescaline. Completely otherworldly yet drenched in the sweetest vocal harmony.
Skip Regan…
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2007I'm thinking maybe it isn't worth the effort to keep the Good Books and Good Albums lists going in the left-hand column. Better to put that effort into writing more blog entries about books and albums? Dear Reader, if you're a regular and would miss the lists, please say so in a comment.
neurophilosophy | October 2, 2007One of my favourite bands, Radiohead, releases a new album called In Rainbows on October 15th. The album is not being distributed by a record label, but instead will be available exclusively as a digital download from the band's website.
There's nothing particularly innovative about how the album is being released. What is innovative is that you decide how much you want to pay for it. You can decide to pay the recommended retail price for a CD, or to pay nothing at all.
Below is a track from OK Computer, Radiohead's third album, which was released in 1997.
oracknows | September 29, 2007It's Saturday afternoon, time for a break from science as I attack the disaster that is our backyard. In the meantime, let's rock out for a few minutes:
I'm not a huge KISS fan, but the above song is the absolutely best song that KISS ever did in their entire career--and it's an ode to my hometown, to boot! It just plain rocks out.
Enjoy!
goodmath | September 27, 2007 Via YouTube, I came across this little gem. Who would have thought that you could create a beautiful fugue from a Britney Spears song?
Fugues are one of my favorite musical forms. There's something magical (and something mathematical) about the way it sounds when a theme counterpoints itself. Anyway - here it is, the Danny Pi video "How to Write a Fugue", featuring the "Oops, I did it again fugue", from a theme by Britney Spears.
Now that you've heard the "Oops I did it again" fugue, here's a better example of the form, by the great master himself, Johann Sebastian Bach. A little slice of…
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2007
Swedish young skankers Seizure City are a new outfit with the Clash and the Skatalites looming large in their pedigree. Reedy kickass singer Tanja knows her glottal stops and is an archaeologist's daughter. Let's hope the band takes off so she can have a proper career in the music business instead of sliding back into the seedy gloom of the contract excavations!
oracknows | September 23, 2007Believe it or not, this post is related, albeit somewhat tangentially, to my area of expertise, breast cancer. It's also related to one of my great loves in life, namely loud, obnoxious rock and roll. Unfortunately, it involves bad art and an album cover so puzzling that, even when considering the source, I have a hard time figuring out just what the heck they were thinking when they put this album cover together.
I'm talking about, believe it or not, the cover of the new Ted Nugent album Love Grenade.
I know, I know, it's not as if one expects the cover of a Ted Nugent album to make sense.…
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2007
Here's something everybody's watching right now in Sweden because one of our best pop music journalists is linking to it from the main newspaper's web site. Thought music lovers elsewhere might like it too: Björk Guδmundsdóttir and P.J. Harvey performing "Satisfaction" at the 1994 Brit Awards. The ladies are 29 and 25 here, raw power!
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2007
Punk musician G.G. Allin (1956-93) led a short hard life marked by drug binges, violence, mental illness and on-stage coprophagy. I've never heard any of his music, but reading about this legendary underground figure I came across the above remarkable photograph.
Dear Reader, please disregard for a moment the guy to the left who is covered in blood and feces. Look at the audience members to the right. What are they feeling? What do their expressions signify?
Maniacal glee? Revulsion battling with fascination? Is the bearded guy dancing? Has the leftmost guy just smoothened his features for…
goodmath | September 7, 2007Naftule's Dream, "Something is There": What do you get when you mix up a traditional Klezmer band with Ornette Coleman, plus just a bit of thrash? Naftule's Dream.
Genesis, "Counting out Time": a catchy little tune from Peter Gabriel's opus with
Genesis, "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway": It's astonishing just how undated this sounds.
Mogwai, "Glasgow Mega-Snake": one of my favorite tracks by one of my favorite post-rock bands. This one should be listened to loud to really get the full effect.
Pink Floyd, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)": Wow, now here's one I haven't listened
to in a…
purepedantry | September 5, 2007Shocking. An epidemiological study of bands in the US and Europe showed that musicians do really die prematurely. Equally shocking: drugs and alcohol are involved.
From the BBC:
A Liverpool John Moores University study of 1,050 US and European artists found they are twice as likely to die early than the rest of the population.
In all, 100 stars died between 1956 and 2005 with US stars dying at 42 on average and those from Europe at 35.
Drug and alcohol problems accounted for one in four deaths, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health said.
...
Lead researcher Professor Mark Bellis…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2007
Here are the lyrics to a really great of Montreal song off their heavily beatlesque 2001 album Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies.
Penelope
By Kevin Barnes
Penelope, shoot the apple off my head
I need to go to the store to get some sleep.
Because I've run out of sleep.
The row boat came so David stopped arguing
with a mime and waved his arms like wheat.
But when he tried to speak the Prince of Plum fell through the
roof of his mouth and handed David an envelope
Inside was a letter that read 'Sir, you were given this
envelope by mistake please disregard it'
Nicolynn, shoot the candle off my…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2007The Coral: Roots & Echoes (August 2007)
Power pop and cowboy rock: Lee Hazlewood (R.I.P.) meets Teenage Fanclub. Catchy!
of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (January 2007)
My generation is releasing divorce records. Kevin Barnes has come a long way into disco zombie territory since his Sgt Pepper phase. Unbelievable vocal harmony over decadent plastic electronica.
The Mars Volta: Amputechture (September 2006)
Intricate searing prog rock. These guys are serious, and seriously weird.
aardvarchaeology | September 1, 2007
My Norwegian buddy Torkel reminded me of the wonderful site TOP 10 MOST RIDICULOUS BLACK METAL PICS OF ALL TIME. These guys are beyond words. And there's a second collection that I hadn't seen before! Satan laughing spreads his wings, as TV comedian Ozzy Osborne used to sing back when I was just an evil twinkle in my dad's eye. Oh lord, yeah.